Chuck Sweeny: The day Mayor Charles Box and I met Nelson Mandela

Saturday

Dec 7, 2013 at 12:00 PM

The year was 1992, two years after Nelson Mandela’s release from the Robben Island prison where he had been held for 27 years by the apartheid government of the all-white National Party, which had governed South Africa since 1948.

I was in New York City that July to cover the Democratic National Convention that would nominate Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton as the Democratic candidate for president. One of the Clinton delegates was Rockford Mayor Charles Box, the city’s first black mayor, who in 1989 won 63 percent of the vote in a city that was 80 percent white.

Box invited me to go with him to a garden party for mayors hosted by New York Mayor David Dinkins at Gracie Mansion.

Dinkins’ special guest was to be Mandela, and we would get to meet him and hear him speak. Keep in mind that Mandela was already world famous, even though he was not a public official of South Africa. He was a freedom fighter and the new leader of the African National Congress, an outlawed group. He had no right to vote in a country still controlled totally by its white minority government.

Mandela came to New York to speak to the Security Council of the United Nations and ask that a special UN envoy be sent to South Africa to investigate violence against blacks. He wanted an international commission to re-start the stalled negotiations between the ANC and the government over ending apartheid and establishing human and voting rights for the majority of citizens.

At the reception, Dinkins brought Mandela out of the mansion to meet us. By then Mandela was in his 70s, but he was sure-footed and ramrod straight as he walked down the stairs. His voice was loud and firm and self-confident as he addressed the 200 or so mayors, their guests and reporters gathered on the lawn.

Mandela told us why he had come to New York. He talked about his mission to the UN. He also stressed the need for an inclusive democracy in a new South Africa where everyone lived under a common constitution that guaranteed individual and voting rights to all.

Then he greeted people with a firm handshake and big smile, kibitzing as if he were a Midwestern governor working the 4-H exhibits at a county fair. Mandela may have been a statesman, a revolutionary, an agent of dramatic change. But he was also the best retail politician I’d ever seen. “This guy’s going places,” I thought.

“He had just come off a 15-hour flight from Johannesburg. The temperature was 95 degrees in New York and yet Mandela, dressed in a suit, talked to us for 45 minutes in the blazing sun without breaking a sweat,” Box remembered. “It was as if he were a youngster.”

Mandela spoke with no teleprompter, no notes, no cue cards, no lectern, Box and I both remember. His elocution was perfect. There were no “ums” or “you knows.”

“Mandela was a well-educated man. He had a law degree and had practiced law,” Box noted.

After Mandela’s talk, mayors had their pictures taken individually with him.

“The picture I have of him and me is one of the most important ones I have. I’ve got it displayed at my home,” Box said. “It was one of the most important days of my life. Here’s a man who had just gotten out of jail two years before, and he was trying to put together an election. He was not bitter. He knew what it takes to put a country together.

“It was hard for some of his followers to agree with his policy of reconciliation instead of retribution,” Box said, but Mandela insisted upon it.

“He was a wonderful man, and they don’t come along too often.”

The year after we heard Mandela speak, he won the Nobel Peace Prize along with white National Party leader and President F. W. deKlerk, who helped ensure peaceful transition to majority rule. In 1994 Mandela became president of the new South Africa, sharing power for a time with deKlerk.

The important thing to remember about Mandela, who died Thursday, is that he led and won a peaceful revolution in a land where change was probably inevitable, but where peaceful change was improbable.

Without Mandela’s constitutional, nonviolent imperative, South Africa’s transformation would have been violent; thousands would have died and the result would have been the kind of chaos and despotism unleashed in France after its 1789 revolution.

So, when you think that a difficult task is impossible, think of Nelson Mandela. He proved Robespierre and Chairman Mao were wrong: Revolution does not have to come from the blade of a guillotine or the barrel of a gun.